5 ms·

> Has the US Navy worked out what no one else has yet? What to do with all the toxic waste? I don't know about the Navy, but we do know what to do with the tox

• gpm 8y ago
  > The only reason we don't do it today is economic [...] Which would appear to be a disqualifying issue since the entire reason people are advocating for nuclear and not renewables is economic.
  • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    The salient point is that it's uneconomical primarily as a result of purposeful regulatory obstructionism. It costs a lot because opponents want it to cost a lot. Moreover, that is a temporary issue. You have a lot of money from oil and coal lobbying against anything that could replace them, but you don't have to reprocess the spent fuel this year, or next year, or ten years from now. You can do it thirty years from now when the coal lobby is dead and gone because nobody burns coal anymore by then. And storing it for that long is much easier than needing somewhere to put it for thousands of years.
    • pfdietz 8y ago
      If you are going to say "nuclear is cheap, we just have to live with meltdowns and learn to like them", then you might as well stop wasting your keystrokes. That dog won't hunt. Or if you're saying "reactors are going to be just as safe even if all those expensive regulations are removed", then you have to justify that (and justify that removing regulations will reduce the cost enough). I am extremely skeptical.
      • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        It's not about having no safety rules, it's about having more reasonable safety rules that weren't enacted with the goal of increasing costs. Safety is always about trade offs. One solution makes things 30% safer and costs $2500, another makes things 0.000000002% safer and costs $2,500,000, another makes things 10% safer and costs $50,000 but is strictly an alternative to a newer technology that makes things just as safe but costs $500. The problem with existing nuclear regulations is that they're stale and brittle. You're not allowed to do something which is a safety improvement because every change has to go through a slow, expensive bureaucratic process. By definition, preventing safety improvements does not improve safety. But it also increases costs, because technology gets better over time in multiple dimensions, including efficiency. You can't use the technology which is both safer and less expensive because existing rules require you to do things in the strictly worse ways that existing reactors do them. The process of improving the rules is itself the source of significant expense. Opponents will fight sound proposals on spurious grounds just to extend the duration of the process and increase costs. Or propose wastefully inefficient "safety improvements" that are politically difficult to argue against, because pointing out that you can get ten times the safety improvement at 10% of the cost with other technologies will only cause them to turn around and argue for all of those things too, so then your costs increase by 110% of the unreasonable amount instead of 100%. The existing process is inherently broken. It isn't optimizing for safety or cost, both of which would be improved by a more efficient regulatory environment. Like the regulatory processes -- by no means perfect but a thousand times better than this -- that are used for other things with equally dangerous potential like dams and large chemical plants.
        • pfdietz 8y ago
          And yet, you have not explained how reducing regulations is going to be done without also reducing safety. Regulations get added because new accident scenarios come to light, often due to near misses in existing plants. So one would expect a regulatory ratchet effect over time, even with perfect rational regulation. It's interesting to compare fission to another area of technology that has achieved high reliability in the face of accidents: commercial air travel. There, safety has been achieved on a pile of corpses. Aircraft are reliable because we've crashed so many of them over the decades and learned what not to do. And we can do that because society accepts the occasional smoking pile of aircraft and passenger fragments. And even there, when regulation eases off, safety suffers. Look at the recent experience at Boeing. I don't think society would tolerate the string of meltdowns that would be needed for the same kind of natural reliability growth in nuclear.